Trump gives ’em Helsinki

President Donald Trump waits for members of the media get set up before speaking in the Cabinet room of the White House, Tuesday, July 17, 2018, in Washington. Trump says he meant the opposite when he said in Helsinki that he doesn't see why Russia would have interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections.. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Photo: Andrew Harnik, STF / Associated Press

At this point, I think it’s necessary for me to issue a clarification. When I assured you that I won’t back down, I meant to say that I WOULD back down.

When I warned you that I could never take the place of your man, I thought it was obvious that my real point was that I COULDN’T never take the place of your man.

That’s why I totally understand how Donald Trump got a little twisted up with his apostrophes Monday at his Helsinki press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And I’m really glad he cleared up our false impressions:

The false impression that he took the word of the reptilian, despotic butcher standing next to him over evidence provided to him by the United States intelligence community; that he valued Putin’s glib denials that Russia had launched a cyber attack against the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign over the 29-page indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers announced last Friday by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Trump explained Tuesday that when he said at the press conference that he saw no reason why the Russians would have meddled in the election, he meant to say that he saw no reason why they WOULDN’T have meddled.

Maybe it’s the fact that he gushed during that same Helsinki press conference about how Putin was “extremely strong and powerful in his denial of Russian hacking.”

Maybe it’s the way he referred to a special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the American election process as a “phony witch hunt.”

It might be the fact that when Trump’s 2016 general-election opponent, Hillary Clinton, cited intelligence findings that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee, he responded, “It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?”

It might be the way Trump, when asked about Putin’s history of killing dissident journalists, shrugged it off by saying, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

Imagine any other American president from your lifetime, in this very same situation. Presidents you loved and presidents you hated.

Imagine how any of them would respond when confronted with intelligence reports offering proof that a hostile foreign power unleashed a cyber war against us, for the purpose of sabotaging a national election and undermining the public’s confidence in our most important institutions.

That cyber attack included the theft of personal information on 500,000 American voters, hacking into a company that provided software used to verify voter-registration information and creating a disinformation campaign with phony news stories meant to confuse the American public.

Imagine how any other American president would react to the kind of stealth attack that Putin perpetrated against this country. Imagine how determined that president would be to prevent such an attack from happening again.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President John F. Kennedy addressed the American public — after Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko lied to him about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba — you could see the anger written all over Kennedy’s face.

You don’t ever get any sense of anger from Trump about Russian hacking. You get defensiveness. You get him changing the subject and bragging about how many electoral votes he got in 2016.

Trump’s genius is that he has lowered the bar to such an extent that he gets credit whenever he’s able to avoid lying, whenever he can string together two sentences without an ad-hominem insult or a blatant mangling of policy detail.

Sometimes, his moments of pure mendacity or cowardice, as during his press conference with Putin, save him from serious scrutiny of his displays of ignorance. For example, during last week’s meeting with NATO leaders, Trump made the absurd contention that other NATO countries “owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back,” because “the United States has had to pay for them.”

NATO countries, contrary to Trump’s suggestion, don’t pay into a collective pot. They each pay for their own defense. And if Trump objects to how much this country spends on the military, why did he insist on hiking the U.S. defense budget this year?

On Monday, with his display of allegiance to Putin, Trump insulted his fellow Americans. On Tuesday, with his sorry attempt at damage control, he just insulted our intelligence.

Gilbert Garcia is a native of Brownsville, Texas, with more than 20 years experience writing for weekly and daily newspapers. A graduate of Harvard University, he has won awards for his reporting on music, sports, religion, and politics. He is the author of the 2012 book, "Reagan's Comeback: Four Weeks in Texas That Changed American Politics Forever," published by Trinity University Press. One of his feature stories also appeared in the national anthology, "Da Capo Best Music Writing 2001."